What Is Affiliate Marketing And How To Get Started?

By Xu Siyuan  

The biggest advantage that affiliate marketing has over traditional marketing is that you get to work and earn from the comfort of your home or anywhere else with just laptop and internet connection.

This is much better than having to wake up to an alarm clock and rush to work like everyone else,

As our economy becomes unpredictable, more people want to work from home that way. Reasons are because:

1. they do not want to be stuck in a conventional 9 to 5 job,

2. they realize if they want to succeed and still enjoy their life, it will be up to them to take charge of their future than entrusting to their bosses.

As much as those aspirations are good, the only question is how to get started and earn consistently as they did in their normal jobs when it comes to affiliate marketing.

This is what I am going to talk about in this article.

Affiliate marketing is basically promoting other people's products for a share of commissions. If you are doing sales and marketing, you should understand what I am talking about. If you don't, let me explain.

Let's say you are promoting insurance or properties as agents which I and my friends have done before.

Suppose you get someone to be interested and he or she buys your product or service, you will be rewarded by the company you worked a fair share of commissions.

This is the same with affiliate marketing.

However one importance difference is that in affiliate marketing, you can promote anything. Besides physical products which all of us are familiar with, you can also promote information or digital ones as in coaching programs, eBooks, video courses, web-based applications and software tools.

You can promote CPA offers. CPA stands for Cost Per Action whereby you get paid for just generating qualified leads for the companies you marketed for instead of sales.

Here is how you can get started.

Let's say you have a passion for cooking or musical instruments like playing guitar. What you can do is to do Google search for ClickBank and signed up a free account.

For your info, ClickBank is among the largest online marketplaces for promoting information products although there are others as well. Once you signed up with them, you can start promoting their products and services.

As to how to get paid commissions, this will happen when you generate at least 5 sales for them. You will receive a check and an option as to whether you want to continue receiving checks or have your commissions deposited directly into your local bank account. They usually pay twice a week and usually on time.

You can also get started with Amazon - which sells physical products but takes 2 months to pay you as they need to make sure their customers receive what they ordered and are happy in the first month before consolidating all affiliate checks in the next. Their objective is first happy customers and then happy affiliates so as to create a win-win situation for everyone.

Besides ClickBank and Amazon, there is also Market Health. Market Health is an online marketplace of various health products and services. But you have an option either to get paid by lead or sale through your marketing efforts.

Once you signed up with either one or all of these marketplaces, you have 3 potential sources of income.

With that said, this is what I do as well. Once you got approved by them, you can marketing in different ways to make money.

1. Digital Or Information Products

For digital or information products, you can create a squeeze page. It is basically a 1 page website that you can give away a free report. It can be about how to cook simple healthy dishes or how to play guitar. Anyone who wants to read your free report needs to sign up with their name and email address.

Once you get that page ready, you can start marketing both online or offline to get as many people as possible to see it.

Every person who signed up for that free report becomes your subscriber or prospect in offline marketing terms. And when you got your first few prospects, you can start marketing products relevant to your free report as solutions for their problems or fulfilment of their desire while making money for yourself.

This is usually done through a set of 5-7 emails or newsletter you need to come up with using a web-based application called autoresponder.

If you are into cooking, you can recommend online cooking courses - which usually consists of membership site, eBook and video course to them. You can also do the same for guitar, travel or any other niche you are passionate about.

2. Physical Products And CPA Offers

For physical products and CPA offers, you do not need to come with a squeeze page.

First of all, most people - searching for physical products especially by brand names and model numbers of certain items they have in mind - already want to buy.

And secondly most CPA offers already have a landing page so it does not make sense to have a second one of your own.

What you can do is to come up with an affiliate site using WordPress. In that site, you should have at least 20 articles talking about a common problem or passion your target market have in common before making 1 to 3 relevant product recommendations that addresses those problems or fulfill that desire.

That is what I do for my CPA offers. But for physical products, I usually promote multiple products as people wanted more variety like electronics, fashion clothing and Christmas and New Year items.

Once you have your site ready, you can also start marketing the same way you did with the squeeze page. The more people who visited and buy from your site, the more money you can potentially make.

With that said, this is what affiliate marketing is all about and how to get started.

Xu Siyuan is a full time internetpreneur who has been marketing both digital and physical products online for 7 years. First in doing part-time from 2008 to 2009 and then doing this full time in 2010.

Article Source:   Ezine Articles expert Xu Siyuan